Window Managers in a nutshell | 20/08/2008 |
| It has always been a quite populair discussion: Desktop Environments or Window Managers as some would also call them. In linux there are a LOT of flavours. KDE, Gnome, XFCE, IceWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, Blackbox, etc. etc. etc. Now it's widely known KDE and Gnome are the most "common" window managers, while being quite heavyweight. Others are less known and used, but mostly lightweight. I've spent the last couple of weeks exploring and "tuning" most of them, to be exact: XFCE, IceWM, Fluxbox, KDE and Gnome. This article is meant to make the choice for new users easier. XFCE XFCE can qualify as a Desktop Environment. It uses GTK just like Gnome. It's only lighter and faster than Gnome. On the other hand, it comes with little applications out of the box. As a file-manager you have Thunar, similar to Nautilus in Gnome. You also have a terminal emulator called Terminal. As to configuring, it's mostly GUI based so very easy. I'd like to see it as a very lightweight version of Gnome. Nice point to make, XFCE works with a compositor like Compiz. It even has it's own very stable compositor. IceWM IceWM, like Fluxbox, is very lightweight and fast. No eyecandy or out of the box apps. I can't really say I was impressed by it, I found the documentation quite poor so I had to mess around with it for quite a time before I had it reasonably configured (mostly by modifying text files). Also I found the custom themes dull and I had a hard time finding some cool ones. It is very fast though, and I believe that if you really take the time, you can make this WM work very good. Fluxbox Last real lightweight Window Manager in my list. This one is very easy to configure, there is good documentation guiding you on the homepage, so this can't really form a problem. Specially for some old hardware this WM is perfect, you can make it look cool with simple themes (there are a LOT) and it will run lightning fast with each app you launch. Fluxbox doesn't come with any apps so you have to install your favourite apps for everything. You can also make your own custom menu and you can customize basically every aspect of this WM. Fluxbox also has it's own composite manager for some eyecandy, yet I found it quite unstable thus didn't use it. KDE The first real Desktop Environment. When fully installed, you've got all you need: Konqueror and Dolphin for managing your files, Konsole as a terminal emulator, K3B for burning, Amarok for managing your music library, and much more. Compiz also works with KDE, you will just needs loads of memory as KDE itself is already heavyweight. Specially when running the most recent version, KDE 4.1, where they added a lot of new “hungry” eyecandy. As for customization, I found KDE the second best in my list, basically because the new version cut down on customization but added some user-friendlyness to it. KDE 3.5 scores a good plus though, so I would definitally recommend this for new people with some muscle in their box. Gnome Last but definitally not least, this one is my personal favourite. It's less heavy and faster than KDE, so with some moderate hardware you can get everything out of this Desktop Environment. It also comes with it's own applications like Nautilus for managing your files, Gnome-terminal as a terminal emulator, GnomeBaker for burning, Pidgin as an Instant Messenger and much more. Like XFCE most of the configuration is GUI based, so very easy and straightforward. And in my opinion it's easiest to make Gnome look very cool. You have Compiz working flawlessly and with apps like Screenlets you can create a very nice desktop with a digital clock, RSS reader, weather info, even a Pidgin dock and much more. Well, I hope this article helped some of you making a thorough choice which one suits your needs best. I didn't mention all the ones around, that would take me a lot of time, as there are a lot WM's. | |
C&C:Red Alert 2 in WINE | 10/07/2008 |
| Although linux isn't the best choice for a gaming platform, a lot of games can more or less run in it. Yes, I'm talking about WINE. WINE creates it's own Windows API allowing users to run, yes, Windows programs in linux. I'm aware it's kind of drawing the lucky straw as to whether games will or will not work in WINE, but I (without any trouble) managed to get one of the best and oldschool games running in it !! First of the installation process (assuming wine is allready installed). It doesn't differ much from the Windows installation. You just insert the CD in your drive and mount it to your default cdrom mountpoint. In there you just run: wine AUTORUN.EXE and you should see the autorun where you can choose to install Red Alert 2. By the way, you must make sure the default D: drive in wine is set to your default cdrom mountpoint. You can do this by running: winecfg and going to the "Drives" tab. When arrived there just click on autodetect and you should see something like: "D: /mnt/cdrom". The installation procedure should now start, nothing you can do now. Just wait until it's done and select "play red alert 2 now" when it asks you. If all goes well the game should start up. Whenever you want to play it, just insert the CD, mount it to your default cdrom mountpoint, and run: wine AUTORUN.EXE and click on "Play". When you finish playing don't forget to unmount the cdrom before ejecting it !Good luck ! | |
Creative ZEN Cobra in Arch | 27/06/2008 |
| As I kind of had a tough time getting my Creative ZEN up and running using Arch Linux, I thought I'd dedicate an article to it. As we all know, most modern "gadgets" are made for Windows, sometimes also for Mac OS X. Linux however is never mentioned. Luckily there's always a way to get things working, maybe not perfectly, but in my opinion pretty usable. First of, you will need gnomad2 for recognizing your ZEN. The easiest way to install it in Arch is by using yaourt. This is a package manager like pacman (with exactly the same syntax), only for the ABS (Arch Build System). You can find a guide on how to get yaourt working here, After that you should synchronize the yaourt: yaourt -Sy (as user) You should now be able to install gnomad2: yaourt -S gnomad2 (as user) Now the only flaw I encountered was that yaourt didn't automatically resolve dependencies, so you might have to do that manually, yaourt will show you what packages it needs and which are already installed, if you see any uninstalled packages, quit the yaourt installing and install the missing packages with pacman (all are available for gnomad2). If you've installed all dependencies and ran "yaourt -S gnomad2" again it should ask you whether you want to continue installing, answer yes any time, to questions whether you want to edit any files, reply no. Now that we have gnomad2 installed, we plug in our player and execute "gnomad2" from terminal. And what do we see...nothing ! Gnomad2 doesn't yet recognize our ZEN. This is simply a permission issue, if you connect your player and run gnomad2 as root, everything should show up just fine. To resolve this, you will need to edit your udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d. As root, you must edit the 50-udev-default.rules file. To be exact, edit this line: # libusb device nodes SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", NAME="bus/usb/$env{BUSNUM}/$env{DEVNUM}", MODE="0660" And make sure the MODE is changed to 666. Save the file and reboot. When you plug in your player and run gnomad2 as regular user, Your player should show up without any error messages. You can now transfer music and videos to your ZEN. Good luck ! | |